On the real voting power index

Both formal and real voting power indices completely disregard the significance of voting methods to processes of coalition formation. This may result in misleading figures of voting strength if estimated probabilities of certain coalitions are utilized in the indices. It is shown that application of the real voting power index of Stenlund, Lane and Bjurulf (a measure closely related to the Banzhaf index) to parliaments using the amendment voting procedure, is problematical. If a parliament votes upon three or more alternatives, the winning coalition on the issue depends more or less on the order of voting. The measurement of real voting power is distorted both if the formation of the voting order is based on application of general voting order rules, or if it is totally unregulated.     

Rational Abstention and the Congressional Vote Choice

Research on voting, particularly on legislative behavior, tends to focus on the choices of those casting ballots. Yet, intuitively, abstentions and vote choice should be jointly determined. As such, the relevance of participation depends upon both the extent to which it can be explained by the costs and the benefits of voting and on the nature of the interactions between participation and preferences. To this end, we provide a framework for explaining roll call behavior that simultaneously considers legislators' decisions about whether and how to vote. Application to roll call voting in the 104th Congress finds that abstention and voting choices are integrated; our approach generates sensible and substantively important results which yield important insights into legislative behavior and public policy.     

Party voting discipline and the power of parties, legislators and states

We examine the distribution of decision-making power among the principal actors of a federal legislative system; parties, legislators, and constituencies. We are especially interested in how the balance of power between legislators and constituencies depends on the voting discipline exercised by the parties.We derive power measures that are related to the Banzhaf-Coleman index of decision-making power and illustrate with a simple example. Our power measures are novel because they are based on an explicit representation of party voting discipline as well as the structural properties of the decision-making process, whereas previous analyses concentrate on structurally determined power alone.     

Gaining power through enlargement: Strategic foundations and experimental evidence

Power indices suggest that adding new members to a voting body may affect the balance of power between the original members even if their number of votes and the decision rule remain constant. Some of the original members may actually gain even if voters are bargaining over a fixed budget. We show that this phenomenon can occur as an equilibrium of a non-cooperative bargaining game based on the Baron and Ferejohn (1989) model of legislative bargaining. We implement this game in the laboratory and find that power can be gained by adding new members as the theory predicts.     

Evaluating the median voter model’s explanatory power

We match individual senators’ voting behavior on legislative proposals with 24 real referendum decisions on exactly the same issues with identical wording. This setting allows us to evaluate the median voter model’s quality with revealed constituents’ preferences. Results indicate a limited explanatory power of the median voter model: It explains 17.6% points more than random voting and that a senator’s probability to accept a proposal in parliament increases on average by 8.4% points when the district median voter accepts the proposal.     

The Legislator as Political Entrepreneur: Investment in Political Capital

This paper applies the standard Austrian theory of capital investment to the standard interest group model of legislator behavior. Distinguishing between reputational capital and representative capital as interdependent forms of political capital, I argue that legislator behavior (specifically roll call voting) can be explained as entrepreneurial investment in political capital under uncertainty. I discuss several examples in which this approach can potentially add predictive power regarding legislative voting.     

The nucleolus of large majority games

Members of a shareholder meeting or legislative committee have greater or smaller voting power than meets the eye if the nucleolus of the induced majority game differs from the voting weight distribution. We establish a new sufficient condition for the weight and power distributions to be equal, and we characterize the limit behavior of the nucleolus in case all relative weights become small.     

Democracy, collective action and intra-elite conflict

We analyze a model where there is uncertainty about the future power of two ex-ante symmetric elites to appropriate surplus, and ex-ante surplus sharing agreements are not binding. We show that in an oligarchy, the stronger elite appropriates the entire available surplus, whereas a democracy results in a more balanced surplus allocation between the two elites. In a democracy, the newly enfranchised non-elite organize to act collectively, so that the weaker elite can credibly threaten to form a coalition with the organized non-elite against the stronger elite. Such a threat ensures that the more balanced surplus sharing proposal chosen by majority voting is renegotiation-proof. Therefore, sufficiently risk-averse elites unanimously choose democracy as a form of insurance against future imbalances in relative power. We emphasize that franchise extension to, and low cost of organizing collective political activity for, the non-elite are both necessary features of a democracy. Our formal analysis can account for the stylized facts that emerge from a comparative analysis of Indian and Western European democracies.     

Noncooperative foundations of bargaining power in committees and the Shapley–Shubik index

In this paper we explore the noncooperative foundations of the bargaining power that a voting rule gives to each member of a committee that bargains in search of consensus over a set of feasible agreements under a voting rule. Assuming complete information, we model a variety of bargaining protocols and investigate their stationary subgame perfect equilibria. We show how the Shapley–Shubik index and other power indices can be interpreted as measures of ‘bargaining power’ that appear in this light as limit cases.     

Control rights, pyramids, and the measurement of ownership concentration

The recent corporate governance literature has emphasised the distinction between control and cash-flow rights but has disregarded measurement issues. Control rights may be measured by immediate shareholder votes, the voting rights as traced through ownership chains, or voting power indices that may or may not trace ownership through chains. We compare the ability of various measures to identify the effects of ownership concentration on share valuation using a German panel data set. The widely used weakest-link principle does not perform well in this comparison. Furthermore, measures that trace control through ownership chains do not outperform those that rely on immediate ownership, thus questioning the role of pyramids in the separation of control and cash-flow rights. The paper emphasises that there is a distinction between these two aspects of ownership even without pyramids or preferred stock, identification of which requires measures that, like the Shapley–Shubik index, do not simply equate control rights with voting rights.     

Power,luck and the right index

Summary We have pointed out the theoretical drawbacks of the traditional indices for measuring a priori voting power inasmuch as they are implied in considering the coalition value a private good. This criticism caused us to view the coalition outcome as a public good. From this aspect and additional considerations with respect to power, luck, and decisiveness, we obtained a story describing the characteristics of an adequate measure of a priori voting power. These characteristics were found to be fulfilled by an index presented by Holler (1978). Through the above analysis this index has received its theoretical justification. An independent view of this index was then provided by means of an axiomatic characterization. This characterization makes possible abstract comparison of the index with previously established private good indices.While we have restricted our attention to simple games, the index presented can be generalized to provide a value on games in characteristic function form. We leave this topic for future conideration.     

Committees with supermajority voting yield commitment with flexibility

A fundamental problem for government is how to combine commitment to certain policies with the flexibility required to adjust them when needed. Rogoff (1985) [Rogoff, K., 1985. The optimal degree of commitment to an intermediate monetary target, Q. J. Econ. 100(4) 1169–1189] showed that a way to strike the right balance is to appoint an optimally “conservative” policy-maker. In real life, however, policy-makers also have power over decisions where optimal plans are time-consistent, so delegating to a conservative person could be undesirable. A flexible delegation device can be found in a large committee of randomly appointed members voting over policy after observing a shock. When facing dynamic inconsistency, under a single-crossing property, there exists a supermajority rule that implements the population median's optimally conservative policy-maker with certainty. Another single-crossing property guarantees that if simple majority voting is used to select the voting rule that will govern policy choice, the supermajority preferred by the median is chosen. For problems where dynamic inconsistency vanishes, the committee will choose to make decisions by simple majority, implementing median outcomes. An application to monetary policy is developed. We show that the optimal supermajority is higher when dynamic inconsistency is more severe, when preferences are more homogeneous, and when the economy is less volatile.     

Maximizing votes under imperfect information

This paper presents an alternative, sympathy voting, to the usual public choice approaches. It deals with voters whose decision depends both on an economic component and a sympathy component. The politician is perfectly informed of the economic component, but not of the sympathy component. The paper compares vote maximization under sympathy voting to the maximization of votes which come from pure homines oeconomici. Sympathy voting is defined in such a way that pure economic voting is its limiting case. The latter property can be used to apply the classical Lagrangean technique to maximizing votes under economic voting. The approach is applied to two typical examples of political choice: the property tax/local public expenditure decision, and public pricing of local public utilities.     

Induced-Value Tests of Contingent Valuation Elicitation Mechanisms

Using an induced-value experimental design that varies whether values for a “good” are certain or uncertain and whether payment is real or hypothetical, this study investigates issues of demand revelation, hypothetical bias, and value uncertainty for four elicitation mechanisms used in contingent valuation surveys: dichotomous choice, dichotomous choice with follow-up certainty question, payment card, and multiple-bounded discrete choice. For all elicitation mechanisms, we find no evidence of hypothetical bias: voting decisions do not vary systematically when payment is hypothetical versus when it is real. Under all design conditions we find the fewest deviations between stated and induced values and the strongest evidence of demand revelation with dichotomous choice. Stated uncertainty in dichotomous choice follow-up and multiple-bounded discrete choice questions does correlate with uncertain induced values, but the signal is noisy. We discuss the implications of our findings for the design of contingent valuation surveys.     

Evaluative voting or classical voting rules: Does it make a difference? Empirical evidence for consensus among voting rules

We provide empirical evidence for Tullock's claim (Tullock (1967, 1981)) that many of the problems known from social choice literature do not show up in practice. In particular, even though theoretically the use of different voting rules can lead to very different outcomes, there appears to be rather high consensus among voting rules when applied to real-world preference data. In addition, the famous and widely studied problem of majority cycles seems to be of little significance in practice. In this study, based on data collected in an online-survey in connection with the 2015 parliament election in the Austrian federal state of Styria, we confirm these findings to a high degree. Our analysis is based on an approach using a nonparametric bootstrap and includes various forms of evaluative voting (which has recently received increasing attention).     

"同酬"还需"同工":职位隔离对性别收入差距的作用

本文提出企业治理结构选择的理论模型,比较了民主与集权两种治理结构对于公司业绩的影响,认为治理结构的选择依赖于公司生命周期的发展阶段.在创业阶段,集权的治理结构更有效率,但要求兼作经理人的创业者有充足的资金.若资金不足,由于经理人控制权寻租和小股东投票权损失,公司面临较高的融资成本,作为补偿,要求经理人的商业能力要显著高于经理人市场的平均水平,即经理人能力同自有资金在一定程度上可相互替代.本文还应用指数化期权定价方法给出了小股东投票权损失估值,结果表明,经理人市场平均商业能力提高越快,投票权损失越大.     

正式契约的第三方实施与权力最优化--对农民工工资纠纷的契约论解释

本文运用契约理论解释农民工工资纠纷的成因 ,提出以下主要观点 :首先 ,农民工工资被拖欠的主要原因并非农民工与直接“关系”雇主之间的非正式口头契约无法有效实施 ,而恰是国家明文规定的、应该由国家作为第三方强制实施的正式契约无法有效实施 ;其次 ,国家作为强制实施的第三方 ,无法有效保护农民的合法权益 ,原因在于一方面国家拥有的部分绝对权力在追求租金最大化的动机下被滥用 ;另一方面 ,作为国家强制实施的直接工具的司法体系的相对权力又被强势利益群体所削弱 ,无法有效进行强制 ;再次 ,国家作为第三方在保护农民工合法权益方面的失效 ,导致农民工选择契约的其他执行方法 ,使得契约的实施由“公共强制”倒退回“私人秩序” ,进而可能导致私人暴力的无序使用 ,危及社会稳定 ,反过来又迫使政府只能选择更大力度地实际使用权力 ;最后 ,国家要重新建立国家作为强制实施第三方在保护农民工权益中的权威 ,就必须考虑“第三方权力的最优化”问题     

Compulsory versus voluntary voting: An experimental study

We report on an experiment comparing compulsory and voluntary voting institutions in a voting game with common preferences. Rational choice theory predicts sharp differences in voter behavior between these two institutions. If voting is compulsory, then voters may find it rational to vote insincerely, i.e., against their private information. If voting is voluntary so that abstention is allowed, then sincere voting in accordance with a voter's private information is always rational while participation may become strategic. We find strong support for these theoretical predictions in our experimental data. Moreover, voters adapt their decisions to the voting institution in place in such a way as to make the group decision accuracy differences between the two voting institutions negligible. The latter finding may serve to rationalize the co-existence of compulsory and voluntary voting institutions in nature.     

Dissertation abstract: Essays on veto bargaining games

This dissertation experimentally analyzes the outcomes of multilateral legislative bargaining games in the presence of a veto player. The first essay examines veto power—the right of an agent to unilaterally block decisions but without the ability to unilaterally secure his/her preferred outcome. Using Winter’s (1996) theoretical framework, I consider two cases: urgent committees where the total amount of money to be distributed shrinks by 50% if proposals do not pass and non-urgent committees where the total amount of money shrinks by 5% if proposals do not pass. Committees with a veto player take longer to reach decisions (are less efficient) than without a veto player and veto players proposals generate less consensus then non-veto players proposals, outcomes on which the theory is silent. In addition, veto power in conjunction with proposer power generates excessive power for the veto player. This suggests that limiting veto players’ proposer rights (e.g., limiting their ability to chair committees) would go a long way to curbing their power, a major concern in committees in which one or more players has veto power. Finally, non-veto players show substantially more willingness to compromise than veto players, with players in the control game somewhere in between. I relate the results to the theoretical literature on the impact of veto power as well as concerns about the impact of veto power in real-life committees. The second essay discusses in detail the voting patterns in the veto and control games reported in the first essay. The empirical cumulative density functions of shares veto players accepted first degree stochastically dominates that of shares for the controls and the empirical cdfs of shares the controls accepted first degree stochastically dominate that of shares for non-veto players. Random effect probits support this conclusion as well. In addition, regressions imply favorable treatment of voting and proposing between non-veto players which, however, does not result in larger shares in the end. Coalition partners consistently demand more than the stationary subgame perfect Nash equilibrium share except for veto players in non-urgent committees. JEL Classification C7, D7, C78, D72 Dissertation Committee: John H. Kagel, Advisor Massimo Morelli Alan Wiseman Stephen Cosslett